The question of a canal to connect the waters of the Wabash and Maumee Rivers, which ultimately became the famous Wabash and Erie, began to be agitated in the early eighteen twenties. This, Governor Hendricks urged, would open an inland navigation canal from New York to New Orleans (Via the Erie Canal of New York) and would be the great agent in enhancing the value of vast quantities of public lands. Indiana alone was too poor to attempt the work, and after repeated appeals for Federal aid and much debating of the subject, Congress, in 1827, made liberal grants of land along the proposed route amounting to three thousand two hundred acres for each lineal mile. Construction was begun in 1832 and in 1836 the work was merged in the Indiana plans for general improvements.

Other canal propositions that never got beyond talk, claimed public attention during these earlier years, and by the early eighteen thirties the agitation of railroads became pronounced. In a word, the fermentat5ion that resulted in the famous internal improvement law was for ten years or more gathering form and becoming a part of public thought. It became a factor in politics and the men rode into popular favor that mounted the hobby of State improvements by the paternalistic plan. Governor Ray was an example of this. His advocacy of the growing sentiment made his political fortune, and an excerpt from his message of 1826, couched in his characteristic swelling style, indicated that he made the most of it. "The whole country," he says, "as if by one impulse, is moved by the master spirit that is abroad. . . . On the construction of roads and canals we must rely as the safest and most certain State policy, to relieve our situation, place us among the first in the Union, and change the cry of hard times into an open acknowledgment of contentedness." In 1829 we find him arguing for a general system of State improvements, including a railway, canals and turnpikes - a scheme not unlike the one that the State adopted in 1836. In view of all this it is perhaps safe to say that the great paternalistic experiment, however ill advised it might seem in the light of history, were inevitable, being but a logical sequence.